The Shadow of Malabron (7 page)

Confronted once again with questions rather than answers, Will wandered out in the corridor, found the staircase and began to climb. He passed the shelves without paying them much attention, but he noticed that many of the books had no title on the spine. Those that did consisted of strange words he didn’t know.

He lost track of how far he had climbed and found himself on a floor where all the doors were shut except one, which was wide open and showed him a room exactly like the one he had been given. Then he noticed what was different: the light blue tunic lying across the bed as though it had been casually tossed there. The open books on the writing table and others piled haphazardly beside it on the floor. One of the wardrobe doors was open, and hanging from a hook was Rowen’s travel-stained red cloak.

Realizing where he was, and alarmed at the thought that he might be found where he didn’t belong, Will turned to leave, then caught a glimpse of something that stopped him: on the wall above the writing table was a small woven tapestry depicting a man and a woman. The woman was dressed much like Rowen, but the man wore clothing that Will recognized as that of his own time and place.

Will backed slowly out of the room and his foot slid beneath him. He regained his balance and looked down. There was a puddle of water on the floor. He thought at first that Rowen must have tracked the water in with her, and then he heard the sound of steady dripping near by. He turned, searching, and soon located the source: water was trickling down from the floor above.

Will wasn’t sure any more where his own room was, but his first thought was that he had left the water running in the bath. He remembered pulling the cord to shut off the tap, but perhaps something had gone wrong and it had started flowing again. His impulse was to run downstairs and tell Edweth, but he thought of the poor impression he was likely to make on Rowen’s grandfather, coming into his house uninvited and then promptly flooding it.

He would have to deal with this himself, and hope that nobody else found out about it.

He hurried up the stairs to the next landing. Here the walls were bare stone, without shelves, toys or books. The corridor was in near darkness, as there were no lamps and no windows. Warily, Will followed a slender rivulet of water on the floor and at the far end of the corridor found it seeping from under a door. A narrow and rough-hewn door, not smoothly polished like those on the floors below. There was no sound from inside.

Will stepped back into the middle of the corridor and looked around.

“Hello,” he said as loudly as he dared, which wasn’t very loud. “Is anybody there?”

No one answered. Will pushed the door, expecting it to be locked.

The door opened easily. The room within was dark.

And it was raining.

There was no roof that Will could see, and no back wall. Just two side walls and a stone floor that receded into darkness. A chill wind flicked icy droplets of rain into his face.

From somewhere far inside the room, if it was a room, lightning flashed.

Will stumbled back and whirled in panic. He bolted down the corridor and collided with someone who gave a loud grunt. Will fell over. When he sat up with his ears ringing, he was facing an old man in a long, dark green coat who was also sitting on the floor, his spectacles tilted sideways and a stunned look on his bearded face. Between the two of them stood Rowen, her eyes wide with shock.

“Grandfather, are you…”

“Nothing damaged, Rowen,” the old man muttered, righting his spectacles, “except perhaps my dignity.”

He picked himself up and patted the front of his coat.

“I’m sorry, I was—” Will said, scrambling to his feet.

“Never mind,” the old man said gruffly. “I expect we’ll both recover.”

“This is Will Lightfoot, Grandfather,” Rowen quickly said. “Will, this is my grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake.”

The old man’s bushy eyebrows rose slightly. He looked towards the open door of the room.

“I told Grandfather everything,” Rowen said to Will. “He’s going to help you.”

“If I can, Rowen.”

Will looked up into the old man’s sharp, steady gaze.

“I don’t know what this place is,” he said as firmly as he could. “I just want to go back to where I belong.”

Pendrake frowned, and pulled shut the door of the strange room.

“Now that you are here,” he said with quiet certainty, “you cannot go back. At least not the way you came. You can only go on.”

W
ILL FOLLOWED NUMBLY
as the toymaker led them to his workshop. The old man’s words had stunned him. He had no idea what to think now, and anger smouldered in him, though he didn’t know who he was angry at.

To his surprise the toymaker’s workshop was, compared to the other rooms he had seen in the house, a mess. Even worse, if possible, than his own room back home. Its walls were lined in an alternating pattern of windows and glass-fronted cabinets crammed with bottles, jars, shards of bone, pieces of coral and crystal, and other odd, unidentifiable artefacts. In addition to the numerous finished and unfinished toys Will saw about the room, there were fat, leather-bound books piled everywhere. One thick volume on top of a tall stack had a sword lying between its pages, apparently as a bookmark. A writing desk on one side of the room was almost completely hidden under great untidy drifts of paper and parchment. A huge workbench on the other side was likewise buried, but in wood shavings and tools. On the floor sat various objects that seemed to have been placed there for lack of anywhere else to put them, including a slab of marbled reddish stone, a shapeless old hat, and a large glass ball.

“Everything is in its proper place,” Pendrake said when he noticed Will’s look of surprise. “A fact that my housekeeper cannot seem to grasp, since she is always trying to get in here to tidy up. One day she will succeed, and I will be utterly lost.”

The toymaker took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he shut the nearest window and drew down the blind. Rowen did the same with the other windows. The room was lit only by the dim flames from the fireplace. Pendrake invited Will and Rowen to be seated by the fire.

“The raincabinet was already here when I moved into this house,” the old man said as he settled into his own deep armchair. “I called it the water closet at first, but nobody else found that amusing. Especially not my housekeeper. Ah, well. Now, you should know there is a toll that every visitor to Fable must pay.”

“I don’t have any money,” said Will anxiously.

“It’s not that kind of toll. In Fable, sooner or later, someone is sure to ask you to tell your story.”

Will nodded, but didn’t speak right away. He had a lot to tell, but he wasn’t thinking so much of the impossible things that had happened to him since coming here. Instead he remembered what had brought him here in the first place. He had stolen his father’s motorcycle, and he wasn’t looking forward to admitting that. But that wasn’t really the beginning, either. There was the move from their old house, and all the days before it, when it had seemed he hardly said a word to Jess or his father. When he stayed out late with his friends or shut himself in his room all evening. And before that, the day that what he had most feared had come true. When he returned home and his mother was gone, and he knew, he really understood for the first time that he would never see her again. It had seemed to him that day that his story had ended and that from then on there was nothing left to tell or say.

He could not tell them all that. Not yet. And so he began with the theft of the motorcycle and how it led to his encounter with the fetches, and all that had happened afterwards.

Pendrake sat frowning in his armchair by the fire as Will told his tale. He did not ask questions, nor did he offer any explanations for the strange and terrifying things that had occurred. He simply listened while Will, stumbling over his words and often backtracking to add details that he had forgotten, slowly got the story out. Once or twice Rowen jumped in to give her version of the events she had witnessed. Pendrake neither asked her to keep quiet, nor commented on what she had to say.

When Will was finished, the old man continued to sit for a time, his gaze distant and his hands pressed together in front of his lips, as if he were deep in thought over what he had heard. The silence was broken only by the snap of the fire, and the ticking of a clock, carved to resemble an owl, that hung on the wall above the desk.

Finally Pendrake stirred. He rose from his chair, took a poker and stood near the fire.

“As I’m sure you’ve guessed,” he said, “you have strayed very far from home. Luckily you have come to a part of the realms that is not utterly different from the world you know. It could have been far worse.”

“How could it?” Will said, close to tears. “You told me I can never go back.”

“I said you cannot go back the way you came. You will have to find another way, as everyone does who comes here and wishes to leave. The border between this realm and yours is always shifting. What is a door one moment may be a wall the next.”

“But nobody knows where I am. It’s been hours since I left. My father, Jess, the police – they’ll all be looking for me. I have to get back
now
.”

“You cannot,” Pendrake said simply. “But I can tell you this. The border between realms shifts in time as well as space. You could spend days here, and return home to find that only moments had passed. Or the other way round. Much depends on the way you return.”

“Do you know the way?” Will whispered, though he already suspected what the answer would be.

“I know of only one way. To find the path that is yours, not anyone else’s.”

“But what about the fetches, Grandfather?” Rowen interrupted. “They’re probably still out there. It was a lucky thing that Moth found us.”

Pendrake turned to her with a smile.

“Yes, thank goodness for the Nightwanderer. Since he and Morrigan make their home in the Wood, I asked them a long time ago to keep an eye on my granddaughter. I have had at least that comfort when she goes off in search of adventure without telling anyone.”

Rowen frowned and glanced at Will, her face flushing as red as her hair.

“But I have not forgotten the fetches, Rowen,” Pendrake added. “The Council met in emergency session when reports came in about strange ghostly creatures prowling our borders. Thanks to Moth we now know they are fetches, and this is of grave concern. Things are stirring in the world beyond the Bourne. More storyfolk driven from their lands by Nightbane arrive here every day. And we must assume the Master of Fetches has seen you, Will, through the mirror shard.”

“The Master of Fetches…” Will echoed. With a shudder he remembered the eyes in the mirror, the presence prowling in his thoughts.

“The Errantry has kept this land peaceful and safe for many years, and most folk who dwell here scarcely think about the world beyond,” Pendrake said. “They have heard of the wars of long ago, of the struggle of the Hidden Folk against their great enemy, of the fiery destruction of the city of Eleel, but they consider these only fantastic tales of a vanished age. Perhaps true, perhaps not. But either way as harmless as any other tale told to pass the time in this city of stories.”

“Who is this Master, Grandfather?” Rowen asked, her voice a strained whisper. “Why did he send the fetches after Will?”

“We don’t know for certain who their prey was. It may have been only chance that you fell into their clutches, Master Lightfoot. If anything in this world happens by chance. You’ve given me much to think about. Most people who open the raincabinet find only an empty room, or a puddle, and a fleeting scent of storm clouds. You are the only visitor to this house who has ever seen the unseen rain.”

“What does that mean?” Will asked. “I don’t understand.”

Pendrake set the poker back into its stand beside the fireplace, then leant a hand upon the mantel and seemed to be searching the fire as if within it lay the answer to Will’s question.

“The Realm is not just a world with stories in it,” he said at last. “This world
is
Story. It is the place that all of the tales in your world come from. Whatever you might find in a story, you will find here. Adventures, strange encounters, riddles. Elves, witches, ghosts, giants. Heroes and monsters. Bravery, goodness, and terrible evil. And many other things that have yet no name in your world. And
you
are here now, Will, and that means you are in a story, too.”

“Wait. You’re telling me that people like … like Robin Hood live here? Or the Big Bad Wolf? Or Harry Pot—”

“I’m telling you that the stories you know began here. The storytellers in your world have always travelled to the Realm, either in the flesh, as you have, or in their dreams or imaginings. The stories they take back to Elsewhere still go on happening here. The stories weave themselves anew. They change, and yet they remain.”

“So none of this is real, then,” Will said. “It’s what I thought. I’m dreaming this, or I’m…”